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October 17, 2006

VP 10: Home againPosted by Teresa at 08:28 PM * 132 comments

Patrick and I and Jim Macdonald are home again after a week of teaching at the Viable Paradise writers’ workshop on Martha’sVineyard. We do this every year. The other five instructors (this year we had eight total) were Debra Doyle, James Patrick Kelly, Steve Gould, Laura Mixon, and Cory Doctorow.

Teaching at VP is intense and tiring. Most of our time is spent working with critique groups and individual students, but we also give lectures. Let me see if I can do the list from memory:

Jim Macdonald: How to put together a plot.Jim Kelly: Ten cheap plot tricks.Debra Doyle: Style, language, and names.Me: Expository theory and close-up text analysis.Cory Doctorow: Copyrights, other rights, and how to sell yourself as an author.Laura Mixon: The care and feeding of creativity; getting the Muse to show up on schedule.Steve Gould: The real life of the writer, and how to cope with it.Patrick: The current state of the industry.

Those are all approximate descriptions.

(In less structured settings, we can find ourselves explaining anything from useful handwaving dodges, how to fake guns and ammo, coping with reviews, the one true way to do word counts, worldbuilding techniques, model dialogues with prospective agents, some known pitfalls of sex scenes, the history of the anthology, what goes into an editorial style sheet, and how to behave at conventions, to the finer points of MafiaandThing. There is an Oath, and the occasional grant of Permission to Write Badly.)

Also the staff, of whom I’m surely forgetting a few: Kate Salter, Ernie Jackson, Jennifer Pelland, Andy, Bill and Carol Boyke and their daughters and Max, Pippin Macdonald, and Emma and Carita Mixon-Gould.

I need to speak here in praise of Carol Boyke. Every year, after VP, I swear I’m going to keep track of my lecture notes. Every year, when I’m getting ready for VP, I find I lost them in the morass of post-workshop exhaustion, so I have to reconstruct my lecture on the fly. This year was running true to form. Then, when I got to the workshop, Carol handed me my notes from last year. She’d saved them. She also put them up online as a .pdf file, so I can find them whenever I want. Yay, Carol!

It was an excellent VP: great students, interesting stories, nonstop teaching. It remains only for me to catch up on my sleep so I can stop nodding off …

I'm still at the stage where I'm enjoying soaking up everyone's accounts of VP. I guess I'm still there in spirit. Furthermore, in the past two days my productivity in terms of fiction writing has skyrocketed.

I'm trying to figure out how to attend VP. Waah. I'm going to throw myself against the battlements during NaNoWriMo to get a start at it, because my prior efforts are very MS-ish. I presented an short story at my local writing group that they had "this is good/this is bad" ideas about and "it needs to be a small novel" and I may break it down and hit it running. Because it's the first new story I've actually written in 10 years.

We'll see. Right now I'm a huge amount of desire but very tired because of my no-weekend RenFest trudge. (seven weekends, full-time job, no break)

I finally got a chance to try Werewolf at this last worldcon. What do people think about "reveal" vs. "no reveal"? That is, when someone gets lynched, should the survivors be told their role? I'm currently leaning towards "reveal"; "no reveal" stays a little too random for too long.

I had a brain before the workshop - I think it's still in one of the rooms waiting for me to dig it outof the piece of luggage it was hiding in.

Could it have fallen amongst the sofa cushions? Like Cory's ring?

I wish I could say that my output has skyrocketed in the past two days, likewise. However, I used my train ride home to decompress from VP, and my first day back to decompress from the train. Decompression takes the form of alternating sleep and video games. And knitting.

(Oh, and insert comment here about what an incredible experience it was, and how much I learned, and how jazzed I am to bring what I learned to my work going forward, only, I'm still a little too brainfried to actually say it.)

Like Hunter McEvoy, I was immediately drawn to your comment on "the one true way to do word counts". Your method seems eminently sensible, but . . . how much variance does it produce from using the word-count feature in Word? I'm obsessive enough about this that I have my Word toolbar customized to include the word-count button (on every computer I've used for the past 10 years), and I check it constantly (with keystroke shortcuts, even!) as I'm writing.

As M'ris points out, I'm pretty stealthy that way. Even more stealthy -- that "evangoer" LJ account is only a stub that I created so that I could more easily comment on Mris's LJs. :) The *real* link is in my sig.[*]

I think you only get to use the word "lifechanging" a few times in your life, maybe at the birth of your first child, for instance. So is there a word that means, "just one level below lifechanging"...? Anyway, that's what Viable Paradise was like.

VP X way surpassed any expectations I might have had for it. I don't think it's overstating it to say that, for me, it was a numinous experience. (I don't get to use the word "numinous" very often.)

For a week, I was in this fantastical place where writers and good writing were the norm. It wasn't unlike those stories where the protagonist goes to the Other to gain wisdom and insight to return to the community. (Can you tell that I've read Joseph Campbell?) You don't get to stay there and that's probably a good thing. But that week will always be a profound influence on my life. I've made connections which I hope will last to the end of my days. (I will also be able to seriously name drop in the coming years.)

I was going on so little sleep that I don't remember if I ever thanked the instructors and staff for their work. They were always there when I needed them. What they did was literally invaluable to me. I don't remember if I thanked my fellow students for their support, including their insightful critiques. So thank you, everyone.

(And eventually, I will have caught up on sleep.)

On to a couple of mundane matters:

Cory did actually find his ring. Or rather, Jim Kelly found it in the couch in their room.

I am prusik on LJ. All of my blog entries are friends only right now, but after listening to Cory and Jim Kelly, I thinking about making public blog entries. (If you're still wondering who I am, look at the e-mail address in my Making Light comments.)

I hope Dave doesn't mind me mentioning that he is krylyr. I'm embarassed to admit that I have no idea who orogeny is except that she is clearly a VP X alumna.

Teresa, I posted this question on the yahoogroup, but wanted to ask if you and/or Patrick have any objections with my transcribing those lecture notes and sharing with the community (here, AW, LiveJournal)

I've always thought about going to VP, but I shoot down the dream every time. I'm not a productive/fast/good enough writer, I don't have a laptop, I don't drive, plus whatever other whatiffity blahblah I need to use to talk myself out of doing something that, while it might be painful, would certainly (certainly) be extremely useful and worthwhile for me to do.

Which is, of course, the real reason I don't do it. Anything that might actually put me on a path to happiness must be stopped.

Teresa, thank you for asking that! Of course, if I could find my true will as easily as that, I wouldn't need a shrink. But that's an excellent approach to the problem.

I would like to claim credit, however, for the invention of the word 'whatiffity' and the phrase 'whatiffity blahblah', which I think is an excellent characterization of the sort of thinking that Matthew 6:34 advises against.

YA we're fairly strong on. Laura's first pubbed novel was YA, my books 1,2, and 5 were ALA "best books for young adults" even if I wasn't trying for YA. Cory's most recently completed novel is YA. And Jim and Debra, as Jim noted, have several YA novels and short works out there. Patrick has edited two different best of year anthologies of YA works.

We will be putting something about the correct way to measure word count on the VP website but the gist is that we're interested in column inches, not actual words.

This means we (and your average editor) are looking at average characters per line (including spaces) times the number of lines on a page and dividing by six to get the number of words on that page. Sampling should go across several pages so it will reflect things like dialog and formatting (such as indented text) oddness. Multiple times page count.

Word grossly undercounts by this criteria--especially if your vocabulary is polysyllabic.

I'm still filling in the diary I was trying to keep. Were we really only there for a week? I feel like someone who's come back from Elfland, except reversed - nothing at home is changed, it's me who's older. Not so much life-changing, for me, as life-confirming. That this is what I want to do and it's worth working at.
Evan, big thanks for the gmail account. I'll try to get everyone's comments typed in so I can post them along with my chapters. I'm not going to revise the chapters yet, because I think it might be more useful to see what the comments refer to, rather than the fixes.
-Barbara

I am still finding myself at a loss for words (which speaks volumes about myself as a writer, I suppose). It was worth every penny, as well as the utter travel hell I went through to get home. I recommend it to anyone who wants to get serious about writing. It's a fun time where you find your tribe, as Jim Kelly puts it, and there's much bonding to be done.

This is not a vacation where you sit around and are lauded as brilliant (or at least, I wasn't...) - and there's a distinct lack of massages (unless you find another workshopper to help you out; being married I didn't even seek this).

It's work - reading, attending lectures, critting others, and hearing your own crits with hopefully open and objective ears. Sure, the crits can sting, you're probably a robot if they don't, but this also isn't masochism camp; people are there to help you become a better writer as you help them.

Now I'm off to pick up the grammar books Teresa and Cory recommended to me...

It seemed like a very good group this year. I wish I'd had more of a chance to get to know people at the reunion, but folks were rather burnt out by then. Still, even the brief visit was more than worthwhile -- it was very instructive watching that last game of Thing from the sidelines, in terms of strategy...

Viable Paradise X was an awesome experience. It redefined me as a writer and helped me plan out some very attainable goals for how to finish my book. I have now been granted permission to write crap, understand I need to stop overweirding the pudding, and know to cut the f'ing prologue. I've also learned some cool new slang. But most of all, I'm excited to be inducted into what feels like the sci-fi/fantasy community.

I can't give enough thanks to both the instructors and staff. And I'm looking forward to seeing all the alumni again soon.

Pretty much what Mur said. I'm still wandering about zombified, but feeling thoughts and information quietly shuffle into place as I go.

I'm also glad I wasn't the only one banging on about tribes. It's been particularly life-affirming to just be able to dive in and hear that 'gabba gabba' chorus in the background. (And indeed have the mental fortitude to be able to dive in)

I say for the n'th time: If you've any vague ambition in the SFnal area, then you should absolutely apply to VP.

(Enter Hamlet, with a Creative Commons License with derivative works allowed.)

Almost forgot. Thank you for giving me what is probably my only chance ever to play Hamlet (or at least Hamlet up to and including Act III Scene I). I've known his three big monologues in the first half since I was a freshman in high school. (The rest of it, not so much unfortunately.)

A point of sheer vulgar curiosity: in whatever markets are left that pay by the word, how many use the estimation-of-bulk count (character estimate / 6, per the link and comments) and how many count actual words (as I'm guessing Word does -- I've never looked for that feature)?

I'm also curious about the need to do character-per-line counts at all when working with fixed-pitch fonts. (BTW -- I thought those were still preferred by editors? Or have they given up that battle?) The method specifically says to ignore "unusual" lines; given this, isn't it reasonable to draw an approximate frame on \one/ page (doing a riffle scan of right and bottom edges to make sure it's roughly correct) and multiply the characters that fit in that frame by the number of pages? Ignoring unusual lines will, overcount long sections of short dialog -- but that may not hurt the estimate since printed bulk would be underestimated if they were included without some extra allowance.

Way too many years ago I ran the NESFA Short Story Contest (twice!); if a story was marginal against our 7500-word limit I'd do word estimates rather than characters/6 because I felt it matched the rules, but I never was willing to waste an hour of a NESFA meeting's time to get a formal ruling. I did have some choice words for the author of a bounced entry >9000 words who sent back "No, it's really 7480 words!", but that's another story.

This means we (and your average editor) are looking at average characters per line (including spaces) times the number of lines on a page and dividing by six to get the number of words on that page. Sampling should go across several pages so it will reflect things like dialog and formatting (such as indented text) oddness. Multiple times page count.

Word grossly undercounts by this criteria--especially if your vocabulary is polysyllabic.

If it wasn't for that last paragraph (and if you'd actually mentioned the moon phase and the influence of solar flares as well) I would have been sure you were kidding. Can you explain the reasoning behind this way of counting? Surely vocabularies don't vary so wildly that after say 70k words space usage (which I assume is what this is about) wouldn't have averaged out to something nearly the same for every writer? Or did you merely forget to mention the influence of solar flares and background radiation? ;)

Thank you so much, Teresa, Patrick, and the rest of the instructors and staff. What a thing.

And if you're curious about it, or you've been considering it for a while-- just go ahead and apply. I didn't think I was going to get in, either.

The instruction was brilliant, the crits were invaluable, but the thing that really sticks with me is the other students-- knowing that there are so many other (sweet, hilarious) people out there in the same place that I am is deeply heartening. And it's a real ego boost to look around at what your fellow students are writing. You can't help but think, "Hey, if they're so great, I must be great too, right?"

(Okay, or you might think, "This is all some hideous mistake! I am nowhere near this level! Surely my acceptance was a clerical error!" But after a few more hours of sleep things usually get better.)

Laura is a great thing vector, along with Steve G., quiet and unassuming. Of course, TNH and Jen are excellent things once thing'd, as they are such Alphas, everyone just burbles along, allowing them to infect.

I am quite possibly the worst thing vector, evah. The dimples kill me every time. Well that, and no poker face.

I keep telling a friend of mine to apply to VP and he keeps vetoing it because he doesn't have the funds. A shame, that. Based on what you've all have said it sounds like he'd have the peak experience of his life.

Maybe I will take up a collection among my friends and send him.

(I would love to do it myself -- writing SF and other fiction is one of those things that's on my back burner while I'm in graduate school, and occasionally pokes me in the back just long enough to get me excited before I remember all the schoolwork I need to do instead.)

Gah! I almost started waxing a cat. After the long and complicated discussion about true word counts, I started writing a perl script which would figure out this information if you give it a text file to parse.

Based on number of characters per line, lines per page, and tab size, it figures out how to lay out the text so that it formats nicely. All the while keeping track of the total number of lines you've chewed up so far.

The last thing it does is spit out total lines used and then the total pages required.

The only missing bit is to keep a running average of words per page so that I could translate the number of pages to a publisher-friendly word count. Then I wondered if maybe a given number of possible words per page could be multiplied by some factor like 70 percent to get an average, and if that were possible, then a running words-per-page sequence to average at the end would not be needed. Just take chars per line, lines per page, divide by six, and multiply by some corrective factor such as 60 percent. Then I could multiply this calculated words per page by total pages and get a publisher friendly word count.

It was at this point that I realized I was quite fond of the shiny new coat on my feline, so I stopped and uploaded the script at it is, to the web.

Those wishing to play with the beast can download a copy of the perl script here:

Caroline, taking up a collection for your friend is a good idea. Seriously. I only applied because my fried Paul Lalonde *waves furiously, hi Paul!!* dared me to, with the payoff of him covering my travel costs.
Seeing as I come from the picturesque overpriced tourist-trap island on the other side of the continent, the travel cost had been my rational excuse for not taking the chance.

And whoever tries to walk off with my messenger bag will die, seeing as it has inside it a pair of 8mm Clovers and a matching circular, with a scarf being worked in Paton's SWS (color: natural geranium). Not to mention that the bag has Mike's 'Comprehensive Dungeon Services' logo.

How come y'all only remember the times when I'm the bad guy? Twice this year I was only Thinged at the end of a game, because the evil scheming Things (viz., Jen Pelland and Steve Gould) knew that if they left me human, the other humans would keep wasting tests on me. In fact, most of my time was spent being a douce and lawful human being, and while thus aligned, I helped kill quite a few Things and Mafiosi.

Furthermore, I told no unnecessary lies. The list of them is short:

I am not Mafia/the Thing.He/she is not Mafia/the Thing.We suck.In the time since you've been tested, I've been tested [n] times.

Ask yourselves: if I come up with an argument like, "You shouldn't vote to kill me, because it'll be a much more interesting game if you leave me in," and you buy it, is that a reflection on me, or on you?

Word really is counting words. But it doesn't care how long or short they are and it has nothing to do with column inches.

Your other choice is to use 6 inch lines with a fixed-space font (10 character per inch) and 25 lines per page.

4 pages = 1000 words

When my editor is looking at a completed manuscript, she's judging things like how many 16 page signatures the book will need at a decent font size and whether the price will have to be bumped. Fortunately for me, I already sold the book, but this sort of thing can determine whether or not they'll buy the book in the first place.

No matter what you put on the front page (114,000 words) they're still going to do this kind of count. The only exception I can think of is electronic publication. Cypberspace pages manufactured from the finest virtual pulp are pretty cheap.

Cool. I'll tweak the program after I've written another chapter of fiction. new rule for cat waxing. If you must do it, do it after you've written fiction. maybe by the time you've written your fiction, you won't feel the urge to wax that cat anymore. And if you still want to do it after that, fine.

hm. stupidly obvious question, but how many characters in a line? or inches. either way.

Also, is there a standard typographical way to indicate "new chapter"? double return? the word "Chapter" followed by a number? my script is jamming all the text together, and currently doesn't allow for chapters that start on new pages.

I promise not to use the information until after I've written my fiction assignment....

Ask yourselves: if I come up with an argument like, "You shouldn't vote to kill me, because it'll be a much more interesting game if you leave me in," and you buy it, is that a reflection on me, or on you?

I thought that argument was sheer genius. I was even in position to enjoy it since I was one of the three things at the start of that game and we had just thing-ed you (Teresa) a round or two before that. (Miraculously, I was still alive at that point.)

My big achievement that game was talking you out of testing me during the first rounds. I think that I'm a much better thing when I have a few ounces of tequila in me. (This is obviously not a long term solution.)

Along those lines, I now know that it's possible for Greg London to lie if he's drunk. Or, at least, the drunkeness is a convincing cover for unconvincing lies. In that same game, it was obvious to me that Greg was a thing during the first round. (i.e., before we revealed ourselves to each other.) However, since I was also a thing, I didn't say anything.

Part of the incentive is that I figure it would be a pain in the ass for everyone else to restart the game after two rounds. The lawful good strategy to Thing is to realize that Things are Evil, and the best solution is as a Lawful Good person turned Thing is to find out the identity of the other Things, and then confess and identify all the Things. Good prevails in the end. But that can make for boring, one round long games.

But yes, I was one of the first Things that game, and the alcohol helped me conceal my evilness. If anyone recalls, when I was finally tested, my death throes consisted of grabbing my neck, screaming "It burns!" like Golem with the Elven rope around his neck.

#26: Xopher, based on what you've said at #26 (including Anything that might actually put me on a path to happiness must be stopped.) and based on the quality of your prior posts in general, I find it neccessary to make a pledge to you:

If you don't apply to VP11 (Jan 2007), I will hunt you down and recite Vogon poetry to you till your head explodes.

I wrote another scene, so I get to put a new coat of wax on my cat. Hooray! So, taking Steve's numbers for page info and words per page, I tweaked my script so it will give a "publisher's word count" based on how much
paper it will chew up.

C:\wordcounter>perl wordcount_20061019.pl story.txt
########################################
Characters per line is 60
total lines for this text is 479
With a lines per page of 25
that yields a total of 19.1 pages
With a words per page of 250,
that yields a publisher word count of 4775
########################################

The only thing it doesn't handle is chapters that start on new pages. right now, they just jam together one after another. I would need to have some sort of text string that would mark the beginning of a chapter, and then I'd have to figure out how many lines would get inserted.

I still can't believe Terry Defino got me tested in that last game of Thing, in spite of Teresa's excellent defense. Next time, maybe Teresa will defend me in English instead of Latin.

Speaking of/to Teresa: was it during the last game Saturday night when you (TNH), someone on your left (Elise? Patrick? Mary?), and I started naming Jack Dunns in the middle of a round? We got interrupted by someone dying, I think. Pity.

I want a continuation. Moving Pictures Terry Pratchett.

As for (en)Viable Paradise and my hearty endorsement of this product or event, what's left to be said? (Laura Mixon was trying to come up with a word for the perceived need to say something different and interesting when one is the last person to critique in a workshop, even at the risk of saying something harmful. Any suggestions?)

All of the lectures were useful, but writing them down wouldn't be the same as seeing the instructors debate during those lectures or the collegia. You can't get VP from a book, nor can you cure it with penicillin. (Commence singing "VP is for Everybody.")

The group critique sessions were sometimes painful, but never (to my knowledge) mean-spirited. As one of the instructors said (Yog?), real-world readers are your willing confederates in the magic act of writing. They *want* to enjoy reading your work. Not true in every workshop setting, but it was at VP.

I felt the instructors were overwhelmed by the increased number of students and requests for one-on-one sessions, but they were still surprisingly gracious with their time. In private sessions, the instructors were glad to answer questions about submission pieces, but also about genre conventions, style, markets, the publishing industry, academia, careers in writing--everything except who killed Asmodean.

People made friends without making cliques. I still don't know how that worked, but it did. (Wild accusation: the instructors have an algorithm, involving a fractal geometry, High John the Conqueroo, our cover letters, and gleaming viscera in jars, to pick the 28 applicants most likely to become friends in five days. No other explanation fits.)

The staff was helpful and kind. (When Jennifer Pelland is being kind to you, that kindness may involve a hilarious 5-minute rant about some personal topic, for which you would gladly at a comedy club pay good money and inhale bad air. All the while, Jen will be cooking potatoes and arranging rides to the grocery store for the next day. If Kate had time, she would be beside you, apologizing like a wounded Canadian to you for something that's not the staff's fault, but she's out arranging a baby shower, getting a card signed, and helping someone make copies, be back in five minutes.) The staff always kept the sheer barefoot chaos of VP pointed in the right direction. Again, I suspect voodoo magic and unsavory mathematics are somehow involved.

Most of all, I wouldn't have imagined the value of being around people who are passionate about writing--yours, mine, theirs, and ours. Maybe your friends and family are supportive of your writing habit, but a pat on the back is *so* not the thing. Dylan Thomas said that a good poem is a contribution to reality; a few days into VP, I started to feel my writing was like that--something that, if I worked at it, could help make the universe more like what it was intended to be, more real.

VP is not the sum of the technical parts. It is tribe, meme, wordplay, collation in the stairwell, jellyfish at night, patience, thoughtfulness and more.

--

Greg:

How about something *really* bog simple, like grepping for a newline and then [cC]hapter 1-9(verbal/numeric) followed by another newline? Or have the script prompt for someone's new chapter common-string?

Yeah, I was thinking of that.
I didn't do that in my manuscript, though,
so I was hoping for something more flexible.
Two empty lines in a row, perhaps?
Or maybe I'm using too weird a format for
my book. Each scene is a separate, small chapter.
I don't do chapter XXX, I just put a short title
to indicate new chapter, and then run them all
together, rather than having each chapter start
on a clean page.

Then I was thinking this morning that maybe
the whitespace between chapters isn't part
of the word count you inform a publisher on.
at which point, I realized that my brain is
fried.

It was such a big deal for me to come down on the last day and crash the par-tay and meet everyone. Thanks for having me. Uncle Jim is a dear. Mac is...well, delightfully Mac. Teresa, you said my name is familiar to you, but you *look* familiar to me, and I'm trying to figure out where I may have met you before.

last comment for waxing utilities: why not give the user the ability to enter in the strings used for chapter and scene (I've used ***, # and ###), that way if they were freaky it shouldn't matter. One thing to keep in mind, all this really doesn't matter until you're ready to submit, so you can just do it on the assembled MS, which should just be one big file?

If only I weren't allergic to cats, I'd take up waxing them. My dishes go undone, my children go unfed because I feel guilty doing those things and not writing.

I suppose posting on bb's is a form of cat-waxing, though, huh?

So, how does one "wax a cat?" I somehow think what comes to mind for a man is different from what comes to mind for a woman. I don't think I'd engaging in waxing a cat, because I suspect the cat would bolt after the first wax strip was pulled off.

Fragano #73: Every sailor is Henry, unless he's a True Love, in which case he's called William (or Willy or Will). I don't know who Sam is (unless you're referring to the founder of the estimable Gardener clan, in which case one could do far worse).

At any rate, my True Love must either be a Willy, or at least have one.

why not give the user the ability to enter in the strings used for chapter and scene (I've used ***, # and ###), that way if they were freaky it shouldn't matter. One thing to keep in mind, all this really doesn't matter until you're ready to submit, so you can just do it on the assembled MS, which should just be one big file?

I think a programmable string pattern is the best way. I don't like it completely, but I can't think of any better solution that makes it usable by most writers. Maybe I'll be able to add it this weekend.

I do use word count as I write to track my progress. This allows me to look at things more objectively than simply boiling things down to "I suck" or some such thing. It's also useful to know my rate of progress so I can try and set specific goals like "Act 1 done in three weeks" or "Book finished in three months". that graph paper pinned up by the computer that's always there looking at me is quite helpful for me.

It's one of those things done just outside the camera's view. Picture Tim Allen with a big power waxer. He's kneeling on teh floor, and there's a sofa between him and the camera. You then see him take his cat out of one of those little kennel cages, and put it on the floor. Due to the angles, the camera can't see the cat, but can see the arm that is holding the cat. Tim then takes the big, heavy duty, electric cat-waxer, and with his other arm, brings it down, just out of view of the camera, to where the cat is assumed to be.

At this point, Tim would be struggling to keep the cat in place while running the waxer. The foley guys would be making 'meowing' and cat screaching noises, and someone would be hiding behind the couch with a fan blowing tufts of fur into the air.

The actual process is left to the viewer to imagine. This has the advantage that it enrolls the viewer into creating the cat-waxing story, and also keeps the SPCA slightly more happy.

But of course! You (being a boy -- the cowboy hat was a dead-giveaway) envision Tim Allen, and I (being a girl) envision a scene similar to the one in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" where Steve Carrel is getting his chest waxed -- only with a cat instead of Steve.

I think of the technical difficulties of getting the hot wax on the squirming cat. Once that's accomplished, I have a vision of a cat covered in white gauze strips. Enter a Nurse Ratchet look-a-like but in a pink smock instead, ready to . . . fade to black. It's all very disturbing and I'd rather write instead of thinking about it.

guess I'm in the disturbing/disturbed crowd. vacuuming always seemed so passive, while trying to give a good brazilian to a cat seemed to reach the height of displacement activities. clipping nails is hard enough!

then again the whole traveling to another country to learn how to construct a yurt for "story research" does top my list of actual activities.

greg:

sometimes you just have to step away from a tool, just like a story. get it "good enough" and see how you feel about it in three months. otherwise you really will be waxing (says he, posting on ML)

then again the whole traveling to another country to learn how to construct a yurt for "story research" does top my list of actual activities.

Depends on what country you're starting in, I suppose. There are Mongolian-culture buffs in the USA who have yurts, camp in them, even make and sell them. If you ever get to the SCA's Pennsic War, go visit the Dark Horde Moritu camp. If you go when they're just setting up, you can help set up a yurt (actually a ger *), or several. And Washington DC recently had a cultural display with items (and folks) actually from Mongolia, if you want to be absolutely sure of getting every cultural detail right.

On the other hand, don't let me talk you out of taking a trip you want to take for its own sake.

#91: just because I have the lyrics to all songs ever played on oldies radio imprinted on my brain, taking up valuable space that could be used for, say, my class in electrical stimulation of the nervous system -- I have a tiny correction:

"I got married to the widow next door / She'd been married seven times before / And every one was an 'en-er-y / She wouldn't 'ave a Willie or a Sam (no Sam!)..."

(As for cat waxing: I first thought of body-hair-waxing, but realized from context it must be furniture wax. Mine would have neither. Nor would they consent to be vacuumed.)

I'm Henery the Eighth, I am!
Henery the Eighth I am! I am!
I got married to the widow next door,
She's been married seven times before.
Every one was an Henery
She wouldn't have a Willie or a Sam
I'm her eighth old man named Henery
Henery the Eighth I am.

JC: Almost forgot. Thank you for giving me what is probably my only chance ever to play Hamlet (or at least Hamlet up to and including Act III Scene I). I've known his three big monologues in the first half since I was a freshman in high school. (The rest of it, not so much unfortunately.)

You made a kick-ass Hamlet, too! Heck, everyone was awesome. Double-mad-propz to all the 2nd-half readers who were probably cross-eyed with beer and still sounded awesome.

Dru:Laura is a great thing vector, along with Steve G., quiet and unassuming. Of course, TNH and Jen are excellent things once thing'd, as they are such Alphas, everyone just burbles along, allowing them to infect.

I learned this a little too late, but next time we meet in an Antarctic research station I shall know better: Once you notice TNH starts aggressively calling the shots, it's time to have her tested for thinginess.

On the subject of thing: How come nobody mentioned this was based on a movie? At least not where I could hear? I got home and babbled about this wonderful pass-time to my husband, who, it turned out, has played Mafia and Werewolf, has seen "The Thing," but hasn't played Thing. He said the actual scene in which the thinged human is tested is actually quite chilling.

Greg: Perl script way too damn cool. Have you ever tried being a vacuum salesman? I mean, as a side gig to being an agent. Because you just sold me a damn vacuum and my cats are looking worried.

Bart! Good to see you got home safely; lovely to see you post, and ditto to everything in it, 'specially as regards staff members. How did we not actually end up gabbing until the ferry-and-bus away from the island? Fastest damn 2 hours that ever flew by under my nose, and for that early in the morning that's sayin' something. Y'all, I want my VPX reunion right now.

#97 ::: Raven wrote:Depends on what country you're starting in, I suppose. There are Mongolian-culture buffs in the USA who have yurts, camp in them, even make and sell them. If you ever get to the SCA's Pennsic War, go visit the Dark Horde Moritu camp. If you go when they're just setting up, you can help set up a yurt (actually a ger *), or several. And Washington DC recently had a cultural display with items (and folks) actually from Mongolia, if you want to be absolutely sure of getting every cultural detail right.

Perl script way too damn cool. Have you ever tried being a vacuum salesman? I mean, as a side gig to being an agent. Because you just sold me a damn vacuum and my cats are looking worried.

I wrote it in two nights. Total time spent was probably on the order of four hours. I was surprised it was a bit more difficult than I first thought. But it really wasn't too bad, I sneeze perl scripts in my sleep. The idea, of course, would be that folks would use it, and it would do what they needed without further waxing.

Hm, I think I have a perl thing installed somewhere on my PC that generates an executable from a perl so that folks don't get the source code, just an executable. Perhaps that would reduce further waxing efforts.

That would have the added advantage that you could use the script without installing perl, which can be a bit of a pain... I'll have to peruse my PC this weekend.

anyway, any waxing on the part of downstream users of this script was unintentional. My apologies.

As for the agent thing, I do have one author I'm currently representing, in the hard SF category. His initials are GL...

I know I'm checking in late here, but I wanted to echo the big round of thanks that everyone else has had for the instructors and staff.

You guys did it. You made me think of myself as a writer. Really and for true. It took me exactly one day to get to writing after returning home. I've prgot all kinds of stories piling up against the filter in my brain.

I really can't add anything more to the compliments on the meat of the course other than a big "what they said!" Still, there's one remarkable thing about the time for me that hasn't been touched on as much.

I'd never been to a party with that many people I didn't know that was that enjoyable. I really just had a great time with all the people there.

Lisa: the story is "Who Goes There?" Definitely a classic, and IMO some of Campbell's best writing; it reads to me as almost all meat even by today's standards, where much of his work is overwritten enough that it might show up in Kirk Poland.

Thank you, Teresa, for your kind words. Sorry it took me so long to drop into Making Light and see them, but life's a whirlwind right now that doesn't include much pc time.

I'm also very sorry I had to leave VP early. No one really had a chance to get to know the true and amazing insanity of the entire collected Boyke Bunch over an extended week. I wish they could have. But there are those of you who know why.

As for your lecture notes...I left before being able to retrieve the originals from you. Fear not, however! I made a color copy of your notes as a back-up, in addition to the pdf file. Next year you shall have them in hand from my hand in hard copy once again. :o)

Greg London: If you could sneeze a perl script that could take a text file and convert it to PsYcHo ChIcKeN I would appreciate it. The BBS I frequented that included it in it's optional filters is long dead and nobody has ever ported the thing to the Mac--or anything else that I've seen.

(It was created when the mandatory BUNNY FILTER was added--there was a woman using the BBS who used the login "Sugar Bunny" who insisted on doing ALL CAPS. Bunny filter converted postings in all caps to upper and lower case, and I expect PsYcHo ChIcKeN jUsT cAmE aLoNg FoR tHe RiDe.)

There might be a shorter way to do it. Perl hackers can get into "golf" tournaments where they try to write a script that does a function using the fewest (key) strokes. Mine might be long, but it works.

Greg London: Cool, and thank you! So, in theory, if I ran your PsYcHo ChIcKeN script through DropScript, rating and brief description here (which indicates you can use the results as services!) I could have a stand-alone app on the Mac that could run on any 10.1 or higher mac, right?

Bruce, I have no idea. I'm not familiar with Macs (I'd really like to buy one for my next computer, though), and I've never heard of DropScript. I'd say try it and see what happens.

I did run that perl script on my PC with Perl installed to make sure it actually works. You give it a filename on a command line. If you have perl on your Mac, you should be able to run it from a command line by typing something like

#117 ::: Greg London mused:There might be a shorter way to do it. Perl hackers can get into "golf" tournaments where they try to write a script that does a function using the fewest (key) strokes. Mine might be long, but it works.

What I tend to do to the cat is shampoo it. It's my general purpose excuse for avoiding something I'd rather not attend anyway - "no thanks, I'll be shampooing the cat that day". As for displacement activity, mine tends to be either games, web or housework (the latter when I'm bored with the two former), although lately I've been using the writing as a displacement activity in and of itself, which works quite nicely.

"Viable Paradise" sounds wonderful. I wonder if there's anything similar on this side of the Pacific (and preferably on the Indian Ocean side of the country).

If you want to make a Perl script/shell script/apple script/python script/ruby script (in Leopard) on Mac OS X into a stand along app with a gorgeous GUI, all you need is Xcode, which is in the /developer directory.

I see a lot of posts upstream about people who want to come to VP, and find tons of reasons not too. Just apply, drat it all. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. ( A week on Martha's Vineyard, Thing and Mafia, and all sorts of fun things. Knitting! Beads! Cat waxing! Sarah! Hmm, I'm biased on the last item. )

Carol and Jen - I can't say it enough - thank you for your tireless efforts and help for the past few years. You both contributed in endless ways to making VP work.

Viable Paradise 11 - Sept 30th to October 6/7th 2007. Next year's group could call themselves the Elevenses.

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